March 25, 2011

Tonight is the night when Instagramers worldwide meet each other in their own cities - Worldwide Instameets. We Hong Kong Instagramers had such a great fun, also witnessing both the Impossible analog Instant photography and the Incredible digital Instagramography at work. Interesting profiles too: CNN editor, CNN producer, philosophy professor, artist, Boo from Monster Inc and a stationery buyer.

We all love the convenience and beautiful pictures Instagram brought to us, but an interesting phenomenon happened when I pulled out my Polaroid SLR690 and the newly launched Impossible Project PX 600 B&W black frame films - Instant excitement! Really, you had no idea.

The epiphany was that even though digital instant photo sharing gives you broader audience and creates new friendships at unprecedented rate, having a real instant photo in your hands and meeting new friends in person is a totally different if not heightened emotional experience. You've got to give more thoughts on this coz we are now so used to exist in a world without our bodies, what is real can become so blur you forget how it feels. Well at least I'm talking about how I almost forgot how it feels when a Polaroid film flew out from the camera, that was just about a year of losing touch of a real usable film.

(Left: indoor no flash unshielded after exposure. Middle: indoor with flash and exposure dial turned to brightest, shield after exposure. Right: indoor with flash and exposure dial in the middle)

Back to the Impossible film which I have some tips to share:

Although this "PX 600 Silver Shade UV+ BLACK FRAME" uses new chemical material, I think the photo still needs to be shielded from light for about 4 minutes right after exposure.

If you are shooting indoor with artificial light, using flash is a must. I recommend turning the exposure adjustment dial to full white, meaning more lights to be entered to the film, for better black and white contrast.

Same goes for outdoor cloudy or under shade conditions, turn flash on and adjust exposure to as bright as possible, you won't regret it.

When it is indoor and you use flash, expect the background objects to disappear into the back in black.

When it is indoor and you don't use flash, you can see more background objects or scenes but a tripod is a must.

For months I kept the excitement and my mouth shut until the above POP arrived us for in-store usage, I was deeply thankful for Impossible Tokyo's support, you can see the details they crafted into the decoration, and I hate to say that I had to take the above photo offline after a few hours of posting it, because it hinted these two B&W treasures before their time to be known. For this, I apologize to TIP.

Now back in the end of January when I was in Tokyo visiting TIP gallery store with Mijonju, Impossible Tokyo mastermind Jun Akaike showed us what were to come and we were speechless. A PX 600 film in high contrast black and white wrapped with a very cool black frame!

Just don't mind the "mushroom" and "loose lamination problem" you see in these prototype films, coz they won't happen in the production versions. The images this film produces are simply stunning, comparing to the previous TIP films. They also brought back the familiar 600 film image softness and your excitement when the film is developed.

Check out this flickr set to see more images and the photo of the Tokyo gallery store. I shall be shooting these films in a few hours myself, will be exciting to share.

March 23, 2011

Last last Sunday was a nice gathering with kids and families out in the park. I feel great knowing these kids and their parents. According to teachers in their kindergarten, they are among the most energetic ones, parents included :)

After an hour or so's cycling, we were just hanging around the playground. All of a sudden we discovered this large patch of grass land (without dogs and poops you know) and kids went treasure hunting. They are natural gatherers from what I see.

And the most interesting thing was, when you are in tune with nature and give thoughts to it, you start to see and hear things city slickers don't. Birds singing all around us, flowers and life everywhere. And of course, me panting too.

All these shouldn't be taken for granted. Quietly wishing friends, colleagues and their families in Japan recover soon, you've taught the world a lot! Love.

March 15, 2011

Do check out our Moleskine shelves in stores. We are planning to create an even more interesting Moleskine corner to include those non-paper products I mentioned before (Full release of product info will come in middle of April 2011)

In the mean time, if you haven't, check out the cool stop motion video of Le Petit Prince Moleskine made.

If you do a lot of labeling, on object that is, this new Dymo LabelManager Plug and Play will be extremely helpful. I love Dymo for their embossers, especially those made in the old days (this, this and this), but really hate those electronic ones with keypads on them. They are clumsy to type, difficult to choose the right font and size without wasting a few inches of tapes. Worst of all, if you loose the manual, it will be very difficult to find out how to get that special character you knew its there inside.

This plug and play model is easy to, well no need to install, just plug in to your Mac or PC, a built-in flash memory appears as a disk on your computer where you will find the software to run. It is that easy. Simply start typing, changing the font as you would on your typical word processor and press print. It uses the fonts available on your computer so you don't need to feel like being forced to accept ugly fonts from the machine. Works great on Chinese and Hong Kong specific characters.

If you press enter during your typing, the font automatically shrink about half the size and you can do double line, triple or more within the height of the D1 tape. One interesting feature is screen capture. Just press a button in the software and your cursor changes to crosshair for selecting part of your screen, once done the captured image will appear right on the on-screen tape and you can print right away. Resolution is of course low and dithered, but that allows you to quickly put a company logo or small images on tapes.

It will be available at city'super soon selling at HK$680 with free gift (I heard that it will be a 2GB USB memory while stock last). Here's the promotional video of the machine.

March 07, 2011

Thanks to Moleskine Asia's great support and dedication to create the best possible presentation of the new Passions releases. Since 6 passions journals are to be launched, we've created 6 different postcards for you to collect. You can grab any number of them and put your journaling ideas on the back, enter the competition by putting the entry postcards in our submission boxes in city'super and LOG-ON. Here's a short video I did on my iPhone.

During the period of our Passions exhibition between 17th and 30th March, SPCA donation boxes will be present in exhibiting stores to support their animal welfare initiatives.

How to enter:

Write down your most special experience and stories with your baby, cat, dog or about gardening, style or travel on a Moleskine Passions entry card in a creative way, and submit to a collection box inshore by March 23rd, 2011. Impressive entries will have chance to showcase inshore. The winner of the most inspiring and unique entry will win a full set of 6 Moleskine Passions notebooks (valued at HK$1,188). In addition, 1 winner per store will be selected to win 2 Passions journals (valued at HK$396).

The final results will be announced on facebook.com/moleskineasia and facebook.com/citysuper on April 15th, 2011. Winners will be contacted by email. For more details, please visit www.moleskineasia.com.

March 02, 2011

The Moleskine brand will never be the same starting from this April. Your typical Moleskine is portable by far, talking about notebooks and notebooks and notebooks, but now you can wear your Moleskine, literally.

Don't get too excited just yet, the product range is not of the UNIQLO type. They are "Nomadic Objects for Nomadic People", as described by Moleskine's 2011 communication brief, to be shown to the world first time in the upcoming Salone Del Mobile in Milan, hitting stores in May for Hong Kong market.

This non-paper product range (mentioned earlier) expands the brand's customer base yet compliment to the current product offer, we are expecting them to be hugely popular, particularly the super handsome pens which has a sexy body and unconventional cap with a special clip. Can't tell you much about it here but it is a very smart and durable design by industrial designer Giulio Iacchetti, get a glimpse of the product from Giulio's sketch below. I had a chance to play with some of the prototypes today, I must say they are definitely going to be lusted after.

How Moleskine is classifying these products as "new tools for cultural pleasure and mobile living":

March 01, 2011

When two incompatible concepts are put together, it often ends up either a creative breakthrough or total disaster. My objective tonight is to find a solution after weeks of blockage.

The idea of a leather briefcase-looking messenger bag made up of both soft and hard leather material created dozens of problems to solve. Instead of tackling them one by one, I decided to make a detour by sketching the first things came to my mind about the concept. It was concrete and petals I drew. The solutions are not obvious at this stage, but emotionally I seem to be able to let go of certain worries of incompatibility. Hope the breakthrough will come in its own time soon.

Walter Isaacson: Steve JobsLove hearing the stories all over again, some of them especially what happened in the past few years are new to me. Most importantly it is a closer portrait of Steve than all other books about him. Isaacson recorded audios during his interview with Steve, check out 60 minutes special and you will hear Steve's own voice. RIP Steve. (****)